light user friendly linux please

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Can anyone suggest a Linux Distro to run on an old laptop (dell latitude) with only 128mb of RAM and a Pentium 2 processor. It has had Win98 on it for a long time which crashes multiple times daily.

Thanx guys.

 

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What do you envision the laptop being used for?

 

Hi Freddy.
mainly Internet access, maybe the odd word processing document.

 

It also need to connect wirelessly to my LAN. At the moment im using a Linksys PCMCIA card. Will I need a driver for it?? Also, The distro needs SAMBA (I think).

 

Slackware mate, nah I'm kidding. Try Suse, Mandriva or Ubuntu for the user friendly distros.

Kraven

 

Hi StuPeas,

Have you looked at Linux.com?
http://www.linux.com/

Here's the download page.
http://www.linux.com/download_linux/

Should be something there you can use. A lot of good resources too.

 

Will they run with such a small amount of RAM and old CPU. I actualy run Mandriva as a dual boot with XP on my desktop so I would prefer something different for a bit of variety

 

Cheers Bill.
The thing is, I know how to get hold of Linux. Its more of a question aimed at Linux guys who have experience with the compact versions that run on less powerful machines.

Thanks all the same mate

 

You can always try the live boot distro's, I dont know how they would perform on your system though.

Kraven

 

Sorry, haven't had any experience with it yet. Thought you were looking for a download.

 

I would look at Feather Linux and DamnSmall Linux, both distros that are designed to run on minimal systems

 

Stupeas,

I'm not too sure that the smaller/lighter distro's include Samba is it uses quite a few resources, at least not the server portion of Samba. They may include the client. It's just been so long since I used one of them I don't remember.

The best of the "light" distro's that I know of are DSL(Damn Small Linux) and Puppy Linux. I've used DSL, but not Puppy. I don't know if the kernel for either of these two distro's will include the modules for PCMCIA cards. All you can do is try them to see. DSL's LiveCD will run on that laptop with no problems as it only uses between 15 and 30 megs of ram anyway. The entire download for LiveCD is only around 50megs, although there may also be a download for a more complete distro of around 75 or 80 megs too. If the driver for your PCMCIA card is going to be included it will be in the larger download.

 

Cheers guys, DSL it is then.

 

Looks like I got in the game late. I was going to say "DSL".

 

O.K. Ive burned the ISO and booted into the live cd but the screen is in a weird color (some wierd greeny hue) and is totaly unreadable. I found a post on a forum saying to change the resolution but cant figure out how to do it.

Can anyone help???

 

You may want to try installing Antix ,
In order to sort out your display resolution problems you will need to edit your xorg.conf file, found in etc/x11/xorg.conf. Google for the info, Tho I have found that it is easier to boot knoppix live cd and then copy it's xorg.conf in place of the original.